Friday, 10 August 2018

This Further Twist In The Handmaid’s Tale

Anyone in the habit of calming their Sunday morning
hangover with a good dollop of The Archers Omnibus would be
wiser these days to reach for the codeine, unless they seek a raging fumage to
accompany their crapulous funk.

In common with most of the BBC’s popular drama
output – peak pathos being the Radio 4 Afternoon Drama which more
often than not traces the journey of an autistic asylum seeker contemplating a
mastectomy while coping with being a single parent to a dyslexic non-binary
child in danger of being taken into care and being bullied online – it has
become a moaning, groaning, wailing, cavilling dramatisation of those depressing
little posters you see at the GP’s suggesting all sorts of things you might be
suffering from, apart from the one you’re there about.

EastEnders with
cowpats as opposed to cows called Pat [long dead, by the way].

One ongoing storyline has resident Lovely Gay Couple Adam
and Ian (the names inevitably leading one to think of the old redneck joke, ‘It
was Adam and Eve – not Adam and Ian!’) hiring a Bulgarian fruit-picker to have
a baby for them.

Lexi has two children she is separated from due to economic
circumstances and is in the early stages of a relationship with a man of her
own social class, once a racist but now happily understanding that love sees no
passport.

(Until BREXIT, of course, when we’ll only be allowed to fornicate with
people who share the same postcode – FACT!)

After initial hostility to the fact
that his lover would be renting out her womb to a pair of polenta-bothering
ponces, Roy has happily seen the light and, in common with Adam’s money-mad
Borsetshire parents and Lexi’s impoverished family back in the Bulgars,
believes that there should be no just impediment to a Lovely Gay Couple’s right
to Complete Their Family.

Who can
blame them, with the celebrity role models on show? As the Daily Mail recently gushed:

‘Elton John, 71, proved he wasn’t adverse to treating his
brood as he was seen holidaying in swanky St Tropez with boys Zachary, seven,
and Elijah, five, as well as husband David Furnish, 55. The family were joined
by Neil Patrick Harris and his fiance David Burtka and their twin children,
son, Gideon, and daughter, Harper, both seven, as they enjoyed a day at the
beach.’

How odd-one-out the little girl looked in this world of men, never to
meet the woman who carried her.

And how shiny and happy did Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black look in June when they took to
Instagram to welcome the adorable Robbie Ray Black-Daley into the world.

As Daley told the Guardian, ‘One of the
things I was so mortified about when I came out was that I’d never be able to
have a family. But then obviously I did more research.’

Mr meets Mr
and baby makes three… what could be more modishly cosy?

But there’s always one
who has to spoil it and in this case the bad fairy Carabosse was Julie Bindel, who hissed:

‘No one has the “right” to their own biological
child – and renting the womb of a desperate woman to fulfil a selfish desire is
a human-rights violation. Surrogacy is the interface between extreme capitalism
and patriarchy.’
Going further, she called surrogacy ‘womb trafficking’ and
asked rhetorically, ‘Is outsourcing reproduction another form of bonded labour?
Would commercial surrogacy exist at all if it were not for the increasing
acceptance of the financial exploitation of the female body?’

In our haste to project The Handmaid’s Tale on
to Trump’s Amerikkka, liberals seem keen to turn a blind eye to the
commodification of women where it happens in Not-Trump Country, most recently
in the renting of wombs by rich men who define themselves by not needing women.

Can I really be called homophobic for thinking this after Stefano Gabbanaof
Dolce & fame – himself about as straight as a perm – said after approaching
a potential surrogate and then thinking better of it: ‘I could not imagine my
childhood without my mother. I also believe that it is cruel to take a baby
away from its mother.’

He did call surrogate children ‘synthetic’, which might
have been a bit on the rude side. But whoever accused Dolce & Gabbana of
subtlety?

And there is something risibly mimsy about men who
can’t bring themselves to have sex with women but want to enjoy the benefits of
reproductive sex – children.

Can’t they just grit their teeth and do it the
traditional way, as Paul O’Grady did? ‘People ask me how I’ve got a daughter
and I say “The same way your mum and dad had you!” Someone held your chips and
you cracked on with it in the bus shelter.’

It
is interesting that those women such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie who have
taken the trouble to adopt children from impoverished backgrounds, and improve
their lives greatly, get a good deal more flak than gay couples who use
surrogates to pander to their own narcissistic whim to have their own ickle
baby.

I’m not keen on curbing freedom, so I wouldn’t ban surrogacy. But once
again we are witnessing the normalisation of whatever men want women to do, and
the demonisation of women who do what they want.

And once again, this further
twist in The Handmaid’s Tale comes from the liberal side – not
from the right.